All
works of art are not produced by a handful of major poets, painters, musicians,
or whatever, and at any time there are always hundreds of others active and
often creating worthwhile, but overlooked, contributions to their chosen area of
activity. It ought to be the duty of a critic to recognise those contributions,
though too many take the easy way out and concentrate on a few famous names.
This is certainly true of jazz writing, with the result that numerous musicians
are virtually forgotten. The name of Tony Fruscella may not mean much unless you
have a specific interest in the modem jazz of the l940s and 1950s, but the facts
of his life, and his few appearances on records, say a great deal about the
period and the musicians he worked with. A fascinating jazz "underground" comes
to life when his activities are examined, and it offers,as well, a comment on
the society in which Fruscella and his contemporaries sought to function.

Fruscella was
born in Greenwich. Village in 1927, though his family belonged to the
Italian-American working class of that area rather than to the bohemian element.
His childhood years are largely undocumented, but he was brought up in an
orphanage from an early age and seems to have had little exposure to music other
than as it related to the church. However, he left the orphanage when he was
about fourteen or fifteen, started studying the trumpet, and came into contact
with both classical music and jazz. He appears to have been quick to develop his
skills and was soon playing in public. When he was eighteen he went into the
army and gained more experience by playing in an army band. It was around this
time that Fruscella also encountered the new modern sounds of the day and the
post-war years saw him mixing with the many young, white New York jazzmen who
were devoted to bebop and cool jazz. They had an almost-fanatical belief in the
music and had little time for anything else. William Carraro recalled: "We'd jam
at lofts, or flats in old tenement houses on Eighth Avenue, around 47th or 48th
Street. The empty rooms were rented for a few hours, and the musicians and the
'cats' that came by just to listen would chip in whatever they could afford at
the moment to help pay the rent. Brew Moore, Chuck Wayne and many other
names-to-be came by."

One of the
musicians who participated in these sessions was an alto-player by the name of
Chick Maures and, in 1948, he and Fruscella recorded for a small label called
Century, though the records never appeared commercially until thirty years
later. They are fascinating documents in terms of what they say about jazz
developments. Of course, by 1946 bebop was well-established and the music shows
the influence of the famous Charlie Parker quintet of those days. But the tricky
themes played in unison by the alto and trumpet also suggest an awareness of the
kind of approach favoured by pianist Lennie Tristano and his disciples Lee
Koniti and Warne Marsh, who were cooler and more careful in their improvising.
And Fruscella's trumpet playing, though superficially akin to that of Miles
Davis, had its own subtelty and warmth. Fruscella was more melodic than Davis.

But what
happened after the heady days and nights of the late1940s'? Fruscella and the
others no doubt continued to play when and where they could, and a few even got
to work professionally. But paying jobs, especially those involving jazz, were
often hard to come by. Bob Reisner, a writer around Greenwich Village in the
early1950s, recalled that Fruscella never seemed to have a permanent address:

"Short
marriages, short stays in hospitals and jails, and he invented the crash
pad. He walked the streets, an orphan of the world but with incredible
dignity. He never accepted anything for free. He would cook and clean and
play music if you put him up."

The chaotic
nature of Fruscella's life wasn't improved by his use of alcohol and drugs. He
wasn't alone in this. Chick Maures, his companion on the 1948 record date, died
from a drugs overdose in 1954. and Don Joseph, a trumpeter who was not unlike
Fruscella in his playing and was close to him as a person, had a career that was
marred by drug addiction. Both were wayward to the point of self-destruction.
Bob Reisner once got them an engagement at the famous summer festival at Music
Inn in the Berkshires, but Fruscella, when asked by a polite listener what he
would play next, replied "We want whiskey Blues", and refused to carry on until
a bottle was provided. And Joseph somehow managed to insult the son of the owner
of the place. Bassist Bill Crow, who was around New York at the time and later
wrote a fine book, From Bird/and to Broadway, about his experiences,
remembered Fruscella almost losing them a rare job in a club with his response
to a customer's invitation to have a drink: "Well, I'm already stoned, and the
bread is pretty light on this gig, so would you mind just giving me the cash?"
Crow said that he "loved the way Tony played in a small group, but noted that he
didn't fit into a big-band format. His low-key style needed a small group and an
intimate club setting to allow it to flourish.

It's perhaps
indicative of Fruscella's life-style, and his liking for a bohemian environment
that Beat writer Jack Kerouac knew him in the 1950s. In his "New York Scenes," a
short prose piece included in Lonesome Traveller, Kerouac writes:

"What
about that guy Tony Fruscella who sits crosslegged on the rug and plays Bach
on his trumpet, by ear, and later on at night there he is blowing with the
guys at a session, modern jazz." Kerouac also mentioned Don Joseph in the
same piece: "He stands at the jukebox in the bar and plays with the music
for a beer."

There were a
few moments of near-glory in Fruscella's career. In 1951 he was hired to play in
Lester Young's group, though the job lasted only a couple of weeks and no
recorded evidence of it exists. It would seem that Fruscella was ousted from the
band due to some sort of rivalry which may have involved a form of reverse
racism. Pianist Bill Triglia, who worked with Fruscella over the years, tells
the story: -

'Fruscella was a white fellow and very friendly with Miles Davis and used to
jam with him. He played with myself and Red Mitchell a lot. He had a
beautiful sound. He didn't play high, he didn't play flashy, but he played
beautiful low register, very modem. When Kenny Drew left and some jobs came
up, John Lewis was playing with Lester. According to what I heard, and Tony
Fruscella was a good friend of mine, Tony used to get drunk with Lester.
Lester loved him. He didn't play the same style as Lester, but it fit
nicely, it was a beautiful contrast, but John Lewis didn't like Tony. Tony
said he didn't like him because he was properly white, I don't know, but
John Lewis tried to get somebody else on. The next job they had Lester's
manager didn't call Tony Fruscella and he was so hurt, because he loved
Lester, you know. He wanted to stay with him, he was a young fellow and very
tender."

It was just
after this experience that Fruscella again recorded some tracks which, like
those from 1948. didn't appear until many years later. In February 1952, he
joined forces with altoist Herb Geller, tenorman Phil Urso, pianist Bill Triglia,
and a couple of others, to produce some music which ought to have been heard at
the time and drawn some attention to Fruscella. Instead, it simply disappeared
into the vaults and Fruscella and his companions carried on struggling to play
their music and earn a living. Critic Mark Gardner noted that, although the
-1950s were, for many, years of affluence, the good times did not necessarily
arrive for musicians, "especially those who had rejected the commercial sop
dispensed over the airways and via the jukeboxes." Gardner also said:

" Jazzmen
adapted, as they always have, and found places to play the way they wanted -
in basements and cellars, seedy bars, strip clubs and coffee houses.
Surroundings were uncongenial but unimportant. The main thing was that in
those varied environments were the patrons were either alcoholic/moronic or
intellectual/revolutionary, nobody told you how to play or what to play if
you were looking to dig what was happening you went to the open door in
Greenwich Village or wangled an invitation to pianist Gene Di Novi's
basement or to where Jimmy Knepper and Joe Maini lived The people who
passed through these underground pads and dives were the jazz underground
The life of prosperous, middle-class America was far removed from those
basement jam sessions, those rehearsals and gigs in down-at-heel corner
bars. Musicians, natural sceptics, turned their backs on McCarthyism and the
rest."

A little
steady work did come along now and then, and in 1953 Fruscella was hired to play
with Stan Getz's group. Some poorly-recorded excerpts from a broadcast from
Birdland do exist, and on "Dear Old Stockholm" Fruscella demonstrates all that
was best in his playing as he shapes a solo that is relaxed, warm, melodically
coherent, and in which the use of spaces between the notes is as important as
the notes themselves. Some listeners might think there is a resemblance to Chet
Baker in Fruscella's sound - and he did play with Gerry Mulligan's group briefly
in 1954 but it is only slight, and Fruscella very much had his own ways of
constructing a solo. There are interesting comparisons to be made between
Baker's 1953 recording of "Imagination" and Fruscella's version from the same
year. Admittedly, Baker's was a studio recording with the disciplined format
that implies, whereas Fruscella 's was from a live session at the Open Door and
has a relative looseness, but even so, there is greater depth in Fruscella's
playing. As Dan Morganstern said of it: "It is music very much of its time - a
time of scuffling, an inwardlooking time, a blue time."

The
recordings from the Open Door - and, yet again, they came to light only years
later - are valuable not only for the way in which they allow us to hear
Fruscella soloing at length, but also for the window they provide into the
modern jazz world of New York. The Open Door was a bar and restaurant frequented
by jazz musicians and which they soon began to use as a place for jam sessions.
Dan Morganstern remembered it as a "haven for jazz people with no money. It was
a weird place. When you walked in off the street, you entered a room with a long
bar that had a Bowery feeling to it. At one end of this bar stood an ancient
upright piano, manned most evenings by Broadway Rose, a fading but spry
ex-vaudevillian her hair dyed an improbable shade of red. She knew a thousand
old songs and cheerfully honoured requests. From the bar, right next to Rose, a
creaky door led to the huge, gloomy back room, sporting a long bandstand, a
dance floor which was never used, and rickety tables and chairs." Bob Reisner, a
free-lance writer who some years later produced a couple of short, but lively
memoirs of the 1950s and also wrote a funny book about graffiti, hired the room
for Sunday afternoon concerts at which Charlie Parker sometimes appeared, but
other, spontaneous sessions took place, and drummer Al Levitt recalls musicians
like Herb Geller, Gene Quill, Jon Eardley, Milt Gold, and Ronnie Singer,
dropping in to play. Geller did go on to make something of a name for himself on
the West Coast in the late- 1950s and is still around, but most of the others
made only occasional appearances on record and those mostly in the 1950s. And
the casualty rate amongst them was high. Quill was badly injured in a road
accident and spent the rest of his life virtually immobilised, Singer committed
suicide, and Eardley had an up-and-down career due to drug addiction.

The music
produced by Fruscella at the Open Door, mostly with tenorman Brew Moore and
pianist Bill Triglia, sounds relaxed almost to the point of casualness, and it
is played without any concessions to non-jazz tastes. Using a few standard tunes
from the jazz and popular music repertoire (the popular music of the pre-rock
period, that is), the emphasis is on improvisation, and Fruscella shows how
inventive he could be in such a setting. He never repeats ideas and always
sounds poised, no matter the tempo. He was presumably fond of the ballad, "Loverman,"
using it at the open Door sessions and also at an engagement at Ridgewood High
School in New Jersey which must have taken place around the same period (1953).
"A Night in Tunisia," the classic tune from the hop era, also crops up at
both places. There are moments on the ballad performances when Fruscella can
sound pensive, almost hesitant, but he skilfully uses that mood to shape his
solos and his emotional sound complements it. It needs to be noted that the
Ridgewood High School recordings, presumably made by one of the musicians or an
interested fan were some more that only went into general circulation twenty or
so years later. Bill Triglia appears to have been the man who organised the
group's appearance. Interestingly, some other live recordings from the same
period and with Triglia again in the group feature Don Joseph and a good
alto-saxophonist, Davey Schildkraut, who was in Stan Kenton's band in the
'1950s, recorded with Miles Davis, but then drifted from sight. Memoirs of the
New York scene prior to 1959 or so place him in the centre of a lot of the
activity at the Open Door and elsewhere.

1955 was
probably the peak year in Fruscella' s short career and he was featured on a
couple of recordings by Stan Getz and was also invited to make an LP under his
own name for the Atlantic label, a well-established company. Fruscella chose
Bill Triglia to accompany him on piano and he added tenor-saxophonist Allen
Eager, a musician who had been highly thought of in the 1940s, when he was
amongst the leading hop players, but who was, by 1955, slipping into a shadowy
world of occasional public appearances and even fewer recording dates. With Phil
Sunkel, another little-known trumpeter, acting as composer-arranger, Fruscella
came up with some of his finest work, especially on "I'll Be Seeing You" and the
attractive "His Master's Voice," on which he uses some of his classical
background to fashion an engaging Bach-like series of variations. Fruscella and
those who admired him no doubt imagined that this album would help him widen his
reputation, but it soon slid from sight and was remembered by only a few
enthusiasts. The mid-1950s were reasonable years for some jazzmen provided they
could be identified with bright West Coast sounds or the hard hop forcefulness
associated with black New York. Fruscella's music, like so much good, white New
York jazz of the 1950s, didn't fit into either category.

What happened
to Tony Fruscella after 1955? Very little, it seems, if the reference books are
anything to go by. He probably still played at jam sessions and perhaps even did
some club work in obscure places, but the "dogged will to fail" that Bob Reisner
saw in him, and his drug and alcohol problems, must have held him back. And the
1906s were lean years for a lot of jazzmen, as pop music took over in clubs,
dance-halls, and on the radio. His kind of music, quiet, reflective, and
requiring sympathy and understanding from the listener was hardly likely to
appeal to many people. It never had, it's only fair to say, but things got even
worse in the 1960s. After years of obscurity, Tony Fruscella died in August
1969, his body finally giving up the struggle against barbiturates and booze.
Bob Reisner, in a touching elegy written for a jazz magazine just after
Fruscella died, said: "If I were an artist, I would paint Fruscella in the
Renaissance manner. A side portrait of him bent in concentration over the horn
which produced the flowing and delicate music. The usual background landscape
would be strewn with a couple of wives, countless chicks, barbiturate
containers, and empty bottles. His artistic life, however, was in sharp
contrast. He was completely austere and disciplined. There was not a commercial
chromosome in his body"

This short
survey of Fruscella's life is scattered with the names of the forgotten. What
did happen to Don Joseph and Davey Schildkraut? Where is Allen Eager these days?
And a whole world of New York jazz of the 1950s comes into my mind when I listen
to a few of the records by Fruscella and others. Where are Jerry' Lloyd, George
Syran, and Phil Raphael and Phil Leshin? Jerry Lloyd was around in the 1940s and
1950s and recorded with Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and George Wallington, though
he never became well-known and worked as a cab-driver even when he was featured
on records with such artists. George Syran was on an album with Jon Eardley
which also featured trombonist Milt Gold, and the two Phils worked with Red
Rodney in 1951, but what else? And what happened to that fine tenor-saxophonist
Phil Urso, who soloed on Woody Herman records in the early-1950s, was with Chet
Baker's group a few years later, and then seems to have faded into obscurity
around 1960. There were so many who had only a brief moment or two in the
spotlight. Not all of them were necessarily as ill-fated as Fruscella. Bill
Triglia. who figures so prominently in the Fruscella story, seems to have still
been alive in the 1980s, though hardly in the forefront of jazz. Nor would it be
true to say that all the musicians mentioned were victims of an unjust or
uncaring society. When there were casualties they often came about through
personal waywardness and self-indulgence rather than from any form of
oppression. Some jazzmen may well have felt that their music was misunderstood
and neglected, but that's hardly an excuse for taking drugs or drinking heavily.
Dan Morganstern may have got nearer the truth, about the early-1950s at least,
when he said it was an 'inward-looking time." Were drugs a part of that
inwardness or simply just a social fashion?

But a lot of
musicians probably just gave up playing jazz, or even playing any kind of music,
and some possibly turned to commercial sounds in order to earn a living.
Compromises are often necessary if one wants to eat. The point is, though, that
all those I've named, and more whose names are mentioned when people reminisce,
deserve to be remembered for their contributions to jazz, even if those
contributions were small ones. We do the artists and ourselves a disservice when
we neglect the past. A form of "organised amnesia' takes over, as is so often
evident when one listens to those radio stations which purport to cater for a
jazz audience but which mostly present a non-stop procession of bland sounds.
There is little or no historical sense in what they do, and certainly no place
for a fine, forgotten musician like Tony Fruscella.